


The instruments of darkness tell us truths

by gogollescent



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s03e03 Faith Hope & Trick, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-20
Updated: 2012-05-20
Packaged: 2017-11-05 16:42:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Buffy, Faith, and poor decisions made in a public restroom, after Kakistos is summarily slain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The instruments of darkness tell us truths

They go for ribs.

“Isn’t your mom gonna wonder where you are?” says Faith, mouth full and eyes lowered; her fingers slick with grease. Buffy thinks she looks soft, with the shadow of her hair falling across her forehead and her lipstick smudging, smudged. Every time she sucks her thumbs clean, Buffy gets a little glimpse of the inside of her mouth. Wet and pink like a blooming. 

“She’s working late tonight,” says Buffy. “At the gallery.”

“Okay,” says Faith. She looks up from her plate. Smiles. An uncomfortably real smile, all dark eyes and curl and teeth. Yesterday, that smile made Buffy feel guilty just for wondering if Faith was secretly evil. Which— she’s not, so, fair enough. But looking at it now, Buffy doesn’t feel guilty. Just tired, and hungry, low in her stomach, where the weight of barbecued meat can’t reach. 

Faith looks like if you cut into her back you would find happiness written on her heart. Happy Faith, who is still twitching a little at sudden movement, half an hour after she spat out Kakistos’ dust. 

Buffy stabs a fresh rib. Slides her fork in close to the bone. 

“That was cool,” she says, “when you did that with the beam. I, uh. Sometimes I improvise stakes, but I’ve never used one that big.”

Faith tilts her head. “Guess you need to find yourself some bigger vampires,” she says.

Buffy opens her mouth, and closes it. She begins to chew furiously. 

There’s something wrong with them, she’s pretty sure. She’s saved other people’s lives before— she’s saved another Slayer’s life before, and vice versa, thanks— and she knows what that feels like afterwards. This isn’t it. And it’s not like it was nothing, what happened. In the warehouse Faith was shocked and quiet. She looked like she had never killed anything before, like she was just coming into her power. 

Now… now Faith is telling her to find bigger vampires. 

Angel was big enough to plug the mouth of hell, Buffy thinks, a little sulkily. She elects not to say this out loud.

Instead, she says, “Maybe I should start throwing the little ones back. Let them grow.”

“Sure,” says Faith. “It only takes, what, a few eons for them to get around to hooves?”

Buffy laughs. Faith gives her a look, like she’s weirded out but pleased. “Sorry,” says Buffy, “it’s just— eons. Wow. I wasn’t expecting you to say that.”

She realizes, a second too late, how it sounds, and plunges back. “Not that I think you’re, like, vocab challenged! I don’t. It’s been a long day, I’m not good with the multisyllabic—”

“It’s fine,” says Faith, shortly. “I wouldn’t have expected me to say that either. Kind of a Watcher word, isn’t it?”

She rips a wedge of meat clean off the gristle, and sniffs it, and then, abruptly, drops it. “I gotta pee,” she says, getting up so suddenly she knocks over her chair and sends it skidding across the tile. She doesn’t pick it up, just turns and walks away, and Buffy finds herself righting it with uncertain hands. The seat is still warm. It is light in her hands, and Buffy thinks about all the places it would break.

*

She goes to the bathroom. Faith is sitting on the counter. “Hey,” she says, when Buffy steps softly inside. “Ever peed in a sink?”

“How about, ew,” says Buffy, and realizes that both of the stall doors are closed. It is just barely possible that Faith actually came in here because she needed to go. And not in that special, high-tailing-it-out-of-town-to-escape-her-archnemesis-with-only-the-clothes-on-her-back-and-the-chip-on-her-shoulder sense of ‘go’. Or, for that matter, the it-hurts-when-you-breathe sense of ‘need’.

Then Faith starts to cry. It’s kind of a big relief. 

“Hey,” Buffy says, awkwardly, and puts her hand on Faith’s hand where it lies. Faith recoils, but Buffy catches her wrist and reaches across to take hold of Faith’s other arm, gripping her lightly by the elbow, by the sleeve. Faith twists and their hands are caught between them, curled in the closing space between their breasts, and before Buffy can process the wilderness in Faith’s wet eyes Faith has buried her face in Buffy’s shoulder. 

“You know, I was going to save her,” Faith says, her breath hot through Buffy’s shirt. Her head feels hard on Buffy’s collarbone. “I thought— I was so sure.”

Buffy lifts her hand to stroke the dark curls, not really thinking about it, just feeling the weight of the other girl’s hair. She cut her own in a bathroom like this, after the bus ride to LA— a gas station bathroom with a lock, but she had felt exposed anyway, her own reflection staring incredulous out of the mirror. She turns her head now, carefully, and feels the tips of her hair brush up against her throat, and rests her chin on Faith’s dark shaking head. 

“You’re still here,” she says, not as a consolation but because it’s true. She’s distantly aware of an awful kind of smugness. Some tiny part of her, thinking,  _so much for positivity._ Some part of her wanting to show her mother this— Faith, the dampness spreading down the front of Buffy’s blouse, the memory of her dry eyes in the mirror— and then to ask her,  _do you think maybe she could take over for me, Mom?_ The taste like bile on her tongue.

Faith is crying harder now, probably recognizing the accusation for what it is if not so much its real target; she slides forward to the very edge of her perch, her legs parting to make room for Buffy, knees sliding wide to bring her crotch up close to Buffy’s cold waist. “Go to hell,” Buffy thinks she hears, among the soft wide noises of Faith’s dragging mouth, or else, “I’m sorry.” Faith’s lip brushes her nipple and Buffy wonders whether it’s her, whether sometime during the summer she forgot how to hug people; or whether Faith is just too fucked up for this— no more able to manage a clean hug than a clean kill. 

It goes on for a while, the meaningless sounds of her grief. After a minute someone flushes and emerges from the near stall. An old woman with a blue hat and long earlobes, who barely glances at them the whole time she’s washing her hands.

She leaves. The stall door swings open.

Buffy pushes her hand up through Faith’s ringlets, drawing them away from the back of her scalp, until Faith lifts her face. “Are you going to go?” Buffy whispers. 

“I think I just cried out all the water in my body,” Faith says, seriously.

“That is actually the worst thing you have said to me,” says Buffy, “and I do not say that lightly.”

Faith laughs, wet and bubbling a little with it. 

“Whatever, babe,” she says. “Like you weren’t lapping up the chance to give a little TLC.”

Slowly, Buffy lets go of Faith’s wrist. This time Faith is the one who catches her hand, laces their fingers. The fit is good. Faith runs her thumb across Buffy’s knuckles, like a blind man reading a map. “Well, I could have done with a strategic towel,” says Buffy, “but…”

“I mean, you showed me, right?” says Faith, going on as if Buffy hadn’t said anything.  The other stall opens, and the girl in it hurries out without even veering towards the sink, and Faith ignores her too. “Saw right through me. All that fuss, and it turns out I’m just a loser who couldn’t even protect the one person— the one person who—”

“Don’t say it,” Buffy says. For her sake or for Faith’s, she doesn’t know which. For Angel’s, somewhere in the dark. 

Faith’s thumb stills against the side of her finger, and she pushes Buffy’s hand down to sit against her thigh, the heel of her palm cradled uncomfortably by the warm stretch of denim. Buffy looks down and then up, at Faith’s dark clear eyes, at the mascara-grey tear tracks on her cheeks. There is a tendril of soft hair hanging over her forehead like the curl of blood from a wound. “Whatever,” Faith says again, her hand strong in Buffy’s, stronger than anyone’s has ever been. Her thigh hot under Buffy’s hand, the pulse there sending tremors up the length of Buffy’s arm:  _I am, I am,_ like on her English make-up exam. Like a meter that was older than Angel was even when he died.

She still has one hand wrapped around Faith’s naked nape. 

Faith’s mouth isn’t moving, is just hanging a little slack, but Buffy can see that at any moment she might begin to speak. So she kisses her. Softly, but totally, covering her lips. She knows how to do it. She did it once before; sealed the other person up until there was nothing but herself and the movement of her hand. Faith is unzipping her fly, pulling Buffy’s hand into the triangle of teeth, and Buffy lets her fingers be guided, follows the downward crush of hair. Her eyes are closed. She can feel Faith’s breasts brushing hers but she is nothing more than the close press of her face to Faith’s face. Beneath her fingertips, an opening slickness, as Faith drags aside the stuff of her underwear with a curse and an elastic snap. Buffy hesitates with her fingers lying lightly on soft folds, hemmed in by cloth. “Way to put the glacier in ice queen,” Faith says into her mouth, and that doesn’t even make sense, Buffy wants to tell her, except Buffy isn’t here; there’s only the action of her hand. The fact that once it held a sword.

She slides in a slim finger. Faith curses, so she adds another, pushing through the resistance of muscle to the promise of heat. Her hand is wet and wetness pools in the hollow of her palm, but she crooks her fingers and then straightens them and pushes aside flesh from the hole. Again, and again: for minutes full of breath. Faith’s face in her shoulder, in the curve of her neck, her teeth nowhere near anything that matters. “Yeah,” says Faith, “like that,” rolling her hips, her whole body arranging itself around Buffy’s hooked hand. Her hand knuckle-deep in a hole she didn’t make. Her arm bent back like a wing. Faith lifts one leg and clamps it across the backs of her thighs, knee digging into her covered ass. She sweeps one kiss along the slope of Buffy’s jaw. “Put your back into it, B,” she laughs, from behind Buffy’s ear, her voice dreamlike and entering through bone. Her tears are cold as a dead man’s blood. 

Buffy slides in just the once more. Tilts her wrist back and up.

Like that, Faith lets go. Of her. Faith’s arms curve free. 

“Damn,” she says, shaking loose, peeling away, moving to slump against the mirror.   “I needed that.”

In the fluorescent lights she is flushed even through her foundation, with translucent shadows under her eyes. Thinking about nothing at all, Buffy moves to wash her hand, but Faith intercepts her, and brings the sticky digits up to her mouth, taking them in all at once. Her mouth is soft and yielding and she works the flat of her tongue against the beds of Buffy’s nails, without demand. There is so little lipstick left that when she presses her lips together a pale line halves the dark shape of her mouth like a scar. Buffy keeps expecting someone, anyone, to walk in, but they are alone with the mirror and the stupid Applebee’s wall tile. She pulls her fingers out of Faith’s throat and Faith smiles, lopsidedly, sweet. 

“Thanks,” she says, low and a little sad. “I owe you one.”

"Two," says Buffy, thinking of Kakistos, but Faith interprets differently, and snorts. She raises one white hand up high and gives Buffy a two-fingered wave. "Anything you want, girlfriend," she says, and Buffy knows that if right now she called Faith  _lover,_ Faith wouldn't flinch at all.


End file.
